24 Hours of Leopard: Spotlight
Feature: Spotlight How it works: Spotlight was another Tiger innovation that just never quite lived up to its billing. It was hobbled by slowdowns and some bad design decisions on Apple's part regarding what sort of searches you could run. While it's a bit too early to say if it's substantially faster at least Leopard Spotlight goes part of the way towards improving things by allowing you to run Boolean searches with the AND, OR, and NOT operators as well as narrow your search results in various ways. In addition, like Google, Spotlight now knows how to add and define words, so you can run simple arithmetical calculations (e.g. "7+5") or look up words in the dictionary, just by typing them into the Spotlight search box. Spotlight can now also search other Macs on the same local network as well.
Who will use it: Everyone who needs to find things on their Mac(s).
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Mitch said 12:10PM on 10-26-2007
I find the current Spotlight to be incredibly useful.
Any improvement would be gravy!!
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Simon Arch said 12:18PM on 10-26-2007
It's very nice. Tremendously responsive.
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Chris said 12:20PM on 10-26-2007
Spotlight in Leopard is MUCH faster. The speed is really impressive. Also, the ability to limit searches to file names is very useful and will surely make a lot of people happy.
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Chris said 12:22PM on 10-26-2007
By the way, Spotlight now seems especially fast at finding applications. I think they have given the application folder some priority in the index. It's now even better as an app launcher and if you now use Quicksilver solely for launching apps, you will probably be just as happy with Spotlight.
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dave said 12:33PM on 10-26-2007
yeah im still waiting for my delivery!! TNT UK says that its a record for them today, over 12,000 apple consignments to be delivered in one day. funny! but im still waiting! grrr!
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anon said 11:02AM on 10-30-2007
Actually, spotlight was the single most userful user feature of Tiger, in my opinion. It's changed the way I used a computer. Certainly lived up to its billing.
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Skoalbandit said 1:13PM on 10-26-2007
Spotlight is the most usefull feature of tiger to me. Don't understand why every tech writer thinks it sucks. Not even sure how it could be faster. You guys running it on a g3 imac? option, command, space bar and bam your searching. Use it everyday many many times.
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Samuel said 12:45PM on 10-27-2007
any xmp support?
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marc cardwell said 2:04PM on 10-26-2007
my problem w/ spotlight has always been that it starts searching for something the moment i start typing, rather than waiting for me to hit "return." same thing applies for searching for an item modified on an exact date. if the 24th is chosen, and i type in 14, it wants to look on the 1st if i don't hit 4 w/in a milli-second. just wait a second, for god's sake!
it's like an over-eager pup.
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JiN said 1:47PM on 10-26-2007
On my iBook G4 Spotlight was hurtfully slow and I wish it would start searching on a carriage return. On my year old MacBook it is fast and can get most of my documents this way. I do use Quicksilver for App Launching and other tasks that would require too many Applescripts to replace.
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Joe said 3:08PM on 10-26-2007
One thing that I think would like to see is highlighting the "Top Hit" first - in Tiger, the "Show All" option is highlighted, meaning you have move your hand over to the down arrow before hitting return. It's not a huge inconvenience, but it disrupts the flow when just tapping return would be much faster.
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Zisho said 3:58PM on 10-26-2007
I continue to be impressed with the tour TUAW provides through Leopard. It's like we're discovering the new OS together :-)
One thing, though: searching network drives! Do I have to run Leopard on the server of that drives as well?
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Fred said 5:34PM on 10-26-2007
Wow! arithmetic in spotlight!! I think that's the feature that's got me most excited about leopard :)
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Mo said 5:35PM on 10-26-2007
I gave up on Quicksilver as an applauncher a while ago; I know it can do plenty of other things, but I didn't really take advantage of its capabilities, and it had enough stability problems to cause me woes. After trying a few different things, I settled on using Spotlight as my launcher in the hope that the imminent Leopard upgrade would make the experience pleasant—and by all accounts, it is :)
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gareth said 5:40PM on 10-26-2007
@9. Press the apple key and spotlight will jump down one place to the 'Top Hit' missing out the 'Show All'. Press the arrow key down and it will move down the list from there.
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ohm said 8:24PM on 10-26-2007
Tried the new spotlight today and am a bit disappointed for a couple of reasons:
1. it doesn't show total amount of results in the top right dialog thingy,
2. the previous results window was more comprehensive than the current standard Finder window. No collaps on the top 5 results in a particular kind of document, just one messed up list sorted on date.. When searching you mostly know what kind of document you're looking for, so this is less efficient for me. I know you can sort on kind, but it's not the default behaviour.
3. no column view on the results window.. would have been nice to get back the instant preview capability.
4. nice to have a dictionary result, but no way to quickly view the definition. It opens dictionary.app ..tss and the yellow tooltip display time is just too short to read the info that is there.. Nice idea, bad implementation.
So far some first look negative comments. One positive, it's indeed faster to show results.
ae
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Steve Williams said 6:40PM on 10-27-2007
Really gutted: Spotlight is STILL unable to find any keywords or comments associated with iPhoto images. I have tried all the terminal hack, forcing reindexing, etc - but it fails to work. I know the keywords aren't embedded in the image files, but you are meant to be able to access them via some sort of linking database.
Well for for me 10,000 images can be spotlight searched.
Any ideas?
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czantra said 5:03PM on 10-28-2007
I like the Spotlight within the Help menu saving needing to open 'Foo Help' and then search. The animated floating arrow is quite fun at showing the menu entries.
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Greenie said 11:46AM on 12-23-2007
Spotlight has rendered my computer completely unusable. I had to go back to 10.3.9. I search network volumes and FAT32 external hard drives maybe 20-30 times per day (not my own drives or networks, but my client's computers) and Spotlight CANNOT index these. Even if I could, if I'm sent out on a 1 hour consult to fix network issues or retrieve data, I can't wait 12 hours while the stupid thing indexes everything on the hard drive just so I can find a few file names.
The only shareware and freeware options available as replacements for the old Find File, EasyFind and FileBuddy, are so hopelessly slow and crippled for numerous reasons (such as displaying path results in column view, which isn't wide enough to display the entire path) that they are useless to me.
The UNIX command line 'find' command is also less than useless for me, because I can't drag and drop results.
I have a feeling Apple won't be fixing this one any time soon. I've already found Windows tools that almost completely duplicated the old Find File from 10.3.9, so maybe if Apple (or another third party Mac developer) don't fix the issue, my next purchase will be a cheap, ugly Windows computer. Already some of my favourite application don't support 10.3.9, so the day will come soon when I need to make a purchase, and I will NOT be purchasing a new Mac if it cripples my workflow.
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